Venice is a wonderful place to visit, if you have a week or even a weekend to spend immersed in art and history, or just to get lost in it and enjoy the romanticism of the place. However, if you live there you tend to hate the town as much as you love it.

Take a house move for instance: nowhere is a house move a kid's game -it is in fact a well-known cause of stress in any circumstance. But in Venice it may become a real trauma. The problem is multi-fold: houses do not usually have an elevator; stairs are usually too narrow for any piece of furniture; space in front of one's windows may be too limited for any manouver.

And then there's the issue with transporting stuff from one place to another: you have to use a boat. Besides the larger cost of boat transportation as compared with a semi-truck or van, boats used for transportation do not protect from rain, so the weather factor can pitch in and change your schedule any time.

I moved from an apartment to another yesterday, and the fact that today I am relatively fine (the aftermath physically amounting to back and muscle pain and some knee trouble) means that I was really lucky. The old place is basically empty now, and the new one already quite livable -some scattered boxes of books and other stuff are still around, but apart from that there's no real sign of the fierce battle that took place yesterday.

The big problem, however, is that I have no internet connection there yet -the phone company that provides it is taking its time to do it. So I expect less blogging capabilities for a while - I will do my blogging during office hours, but this is probably going to mean shorter posts in the next couple of weeks.